Artist's exhibit tells new stories about killed journalists

Julian Koschwitz is doing his part to
ensure that the 918 journalists killed
for their work since 1992 don't fade into mere numbers.

Koschwitz, an interactive
art director who teaches at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in northern
Italy, creates installations that connect virtual media to practical mechanical
devices. His most recent work, "On Journalism #2 Typewriter,"
writes stories about individual journalists who have been killed worldwide
since 1992. The text, which is continually typed, uses data about the
journalists' lives as well as their published work. Individual stories are
connected through common subjects such as the field of coverage and location. The
typewriter also creates images with varying levels of distortion depending on
how many journalists have been killed in a particular country.

The installation's data is based on the
CPJ website and supplemented with information about the journalists and their
work found through Web searches. Because the typewriter runs on generative
software, using queries on different websites to create each person's
story, Koschwitz estimates that it
would take four to five months before any information is repeated.

"I want to provide something very known and familiar
and to augment it in a way you wouldn't expect, so we get into a field where we
interact in a meta-level, where we try to understand more the story behind it,
the technological history and human history behind the object," Koschwitz says.

By using a
typewriter, an outdated machine, the artist examines the space between the work
that journalists produce and the way we have become accustomed to receiving
that work. The installation not only highlights our relationship to media and
technology, but also illustrates the disconnect between the information we
receive, often virtually, and the people who risk their lives to provide it. "Today, with all the media we're
surrounded by, maybe we don't think about who actually risks their life to
provide the information," he says. "I felt this is something that needs to be remembered
and put in our consciences."

Koschwitz says
he is intrigued by the idea of taking information from a database and coming up
with new categories in order to use the data to tell stories. "I can use a database, which you wouldn't consider using
as storytelling, to unfold and tell a story from it and give a touch to a story
that can take different paths and can have a different angle," he says. This
creates the opportunity to contextualize, in this case not just how many
journalists have been killed, but from where, what they were reporting on, and how
the topic they reported on years ago is still being written about today.

By combining virtual data with something
tangible that we recognize from our daily lives, Koschwitz wants us to question
our behavior toward a particular object. He once created a faucet that, when
turned on, triggered the expected sound of running water, but had no water actually
coming out of the faucet. This piece was intended to provoke ideas about water
use, availability, and wastefulness.

Koschwitz said
he initially came across the data from CPJ and spent days browsing through the
database. "I had this
idea of how I could visually represent these people without making it a line
graph, or just a set of visual elements where everything represents one person
on a map. I was thinking: How can I turn this data into something that can be
experienced?"

The installation lives in Italy.
Koschwitz said he plans to release a version 3 Typewriter in the future.

Nicole Schilit is CPJ’s Journalist Assistance Associate. She has a master's in public administration from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a bachelor's in documentary photography from Oberlin College in Ohio.